What is Sylpheed?
Introduction to Sylpheed
Sylpheed is a fast e-mail and news client. It will run on just
about any Linux or Unix compliant system.
Sylpheed is:
Light on system resources.
Very fast.
easy to learn and operate, due to its graceful and
sophisticated interface.
Loaded with features.
Main features
This list is not complete, but the most common features of
Sylpheed are:
Unlimited multiple account handling
Thread display
Filtering
MIME (attachments)
built-in image view
X-Face support
External editor support
Message queueing
Draft message function
Template
Line-wrapping
Clickable URI
XML-based addressbook
LDAP addressbook
Jpilot addressbook (for Palm types handhelds)
Newly arrived and unread message management
Multiple MH folder support
Mew/Wanderlust compatible key bindings
News reader function
Printing
UIDL support
APOP authentication
SMTP AUTH support
IPv6 support
GPG encryption and signature
Autoconf, automake support
Support of i18n of messages by gettext
Supports many locales, including UTF-8 (Unicode), when using
libjconv
IMAP4 compliant
Methods for managing messages
There are several ways to manage messages. The best known is
not at all
.
Many people receive an unmanageable amount of e-mail, which
usually ends up in the INBOX folder, ignored and forgotten. If you are
one of these people, you are constantly trying to locate that one
important email you got 5 days ago in a inbox that contains more than
5000 messages. Locating one email out of very many unsorted messages is
always a time-consuming and frustrating experience.
Sylpheed helps this situation with its mailfolders and
mailboxes.
Different mailboxes can store different kinds of mails. Suppose
you are a member of a kiting club, and you get at least 30 e-mails per
day from that club. You can create a separate kiting club mailbox, in
which you can move any e-mail that comes from this club. You will always
have all your kiting e-mails in one place.
Tedious, you say, to move 30 mails a day to that box, when email
comes in at random moments? It is certain that you will miss that very
important email about transport to the kiting ground where you will have
the contest of biggest and most beautiful kite!
Well, for this situation there is also a solution- filters.
Filters can automate the process of moving e-mails to new
mailboxes. Further on in this manual you will also learn about setting
up filters, so you do not have to manually move these kiting e-mails to
the kiting club mailbox.
Okay, so what is the difference between a mailbox and a
mailfolder?
This is the same way you organize information on your harddisk.
You create directories in which you put files or more
directories.
In Sylpheed, you can create mailboxes within mailboxes For
example, you could create a mailbox (folder) that contains the
mailboxes for all the different mailing lists to which you belong
.
A word of clarification- In Sylpheed, a maillbox is nothing more
than a directory. In a directory you can create either a new directory
or files. Sylpheed stores each e-mail in a separate file on disk. An
example of how a mailbox tree could look is
As you can see, there is no real limit to the way you
can set up your mailboxes. As long as you have diskspace available,
you can create mailboxes and mailboxes within mailboxes.
Of course, you should observe some common sense when you start
creating mailboxes. It is not a good idea to keep all mail in one
place but to create a maze of mailboxes is not a good idea
either!